We collected my father’s clothes so that we could give them to people who might need them. The jacket he wore every day was hanging up in the storeroom. In it I found his wallet. There was some money, his driving 18licence and, in the part which folds back, a photograph slipped inside a newspaper cutting. An old photograph with serrated edges. It showed a group of workers all wearing caps, arranged in three rows, staring straight at the camera. The sort of photograph one found in history books to ‘illustrate’ an industrial strike or the Front Populaire. I spotted my father in the back row, looking serious, almost worried. Many were laughing. The newspaper cutting gave the results of the entrance exam to the teachers’ training college in Rouen, listed in order of merit. The second name was mine.

My mother gradually calmed down. She continued to serve the customers as before. Living on her own, she developed sunken features. She took to visiting the cemetery early every morning before she opened the shop.

On the train journey home that Sunday, I tried to keep my son entertained so that he would behave himself. People travelling first-class have no time for noise and restless children. I suddenly realized with astonishment: ‘Now I really am bourgeois,’ and ‘It’s too late.’

Later that summer, while I was waiting for news of my first job, I thought to myself: ‘One day I shall have to explain all this.’ What I meant was, to write about my father, his life and the distance which had come between us during my adolescence. Although it had something to do with class, it was different, indefinable. Like fractured love.

A while later I started writing a novel in which my father was the main character. Halfway through the book I began to experience feelings of disgust.19

I realize now that a novel is out of the question. In order to tell the story of a life governed by necessity, I have no right to adopt an artistic approach, or attempt to produce something ‘moving’ or ‘gripping’. I shall collate my father’s words, tastes and mannerisms, the main events of his life, all the external evidence of his existence, an existence which I too shared.

No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral way of writing comes to me naturally, it is the very same style I used when I wrote home telling my parents the latest news.

The story begins in a small village in the Pays de Caux, twenty-five kilometres from the coast, a few months before the turn of the century. Those who didn’t have any land rented themselves to the wealthy farmers of the area. My grandfather worked as a carter on one of these farms. In summer he also helped out with the haymaking and harvesting. He had done nothing else all his life from the age of eight. On Saturday evenings he brought back the week’s pay to his wife and she gave him his Sunday off so that he could go and play dominoes and have a couple of drinks. He came home drunk, in an even worse mood. At the slightest thing he would lash out at the children with his cap. He was a hard man, nobody dared pick a quarrel with him. Life was not all roses for his wife. His meanness was the driving force which helped him resist poverty and convince himself that he was a man. What really enraged him was to see one of the family reading a book or a newspaper in his 20house. He hadn’t had time to learn how to read or write. He could certainly count.